Hard to Handle

by Christine Warren

  A few minutes later, Dag pushed the front door fully open, and waved them inside. “Come. You will grow chilled. The structure is safe enough for now.”

  The women filed inside with Maddie in the lead and Ash bringing up the rear, but she had no trouble hearing Maeve’s gasp or Maddie’s swift demand. “What does that mean? ‘For now.’”

  They found Drum in the sitting room surrounded by the debris of the quake, pictures fallen from walls and lamps and knickknacks knocked off shelves and tables. He looked up to answer his mother’s question. “There are some cracks in the plaster here and there, but they don’t run into the ceilings, and I haven’t found any that go into the walls themselves. It’s a stroke of good fortune. I would have expected some serious damage after feeling the force of those tremors.”

  Kylie murmured an agreement. “For a second, I felt like I was in San Francisco instead of Ireland.”

  Maddie stood in the center of the room surrounded by a lifetime of memories tossed rudely to the floor. Ash looked into her eyes and saw a flicker of pain before the woman lifted her chin, straightened her shoulders, and stepped carefully over an antique brass lamp, its cream-colored shade wildly askew.

  “I’ve always said this family has an Angel watching over us,” the woman said with a firm tone that brooked no opposition. “Michael, Maeve, if you’ll straighten up enough to make sure no one hurts themselves, I’ll put on the kettle and bring back a bin liner for anything that can’t be saved.” Then she turned and marched into her kitchen with all the dignity of a warrior queen at the head of her troops.

  Her children hopped to obey without a word of protest, and Ash was happy to lend a hand. She would feel foolish just standing around, and while she didn’t know where each item belonged, there were enough pieces of glass and broken bits scattered about that she could easily identify to keep her busy. Kylie and Dag must have entertained similar feelings, because they, too, joined in to clean up the mess. Maddie brought in the promised trash bag, then returned to her domain to prepare the tea tray.

  When only the younger crowd remained in the room, Kylie raised her head and looked around until her gaze landed on Ash. “How did this last quake compare to the one you felt when you were at the ruin?”

  Ash paused to think and dropped her handful of junk into the bag the other woman held open. “This was stronger. In fact, it is the strongest I have experienced. Why?”

  The American glanced at her Guardian with a look of concern, and it was Dag who answered Ash’s question. “If a weaker disturbance could rip open the earth on the last occasion, it would be logical to assume that the same could have happened this time.”

  “But why would anyone want to create the entrance to some empty cave?” Maeve asked. She frowned as she set items back on the shelves of an old painted hutch. “What good does that do anyone?”

  Ash considered the possibilities. None of them offered much in the way of reassurance. The least objectionable goal had to do with creating places to hide large numbers of nocturnis in preparation for some sort of attack or large working of dark magic. The options for disaster only grew from there.

  “We cannot speculate,” Dag said in his low, rough voice. “It is impossible to understand the logic of evil.”

  “We really won’t know until we go check things out for ourselves,” Kylie agreed.

  “All right, then.” Maeve dusted her hands together. “What are we waiting for?”

  “Tea,” Maddie announced as she entered carrying a large, burdened tray. “Oh, and I made some currant biscuits just yesterday. I hope you like them.”

  Drum lunged forward to take the heavy load from his mother’s hands and set it on the low table in front of the sofa. “That wasn’t necessary, Ma. We really should go take a look at things. And Maeve, when I say ‘we,’ your name does not appear on that list. We don’t know what we might run into, and I won’t have you—”

  “Leaving your mother to deal with this mess all by herself,” Ash finished for him. He might not have noticed the look of mutiny taking over his sister’s expression, but she had.

  Drum was right to put Maeve’s safety first, even if he had been about to do so in the worst possible manner. They couldn’t predict what they might find at the ruins, and the youngest Drummond sibling had no way of protecting herself against the things they might face. Even her untrained Warden of a brother was better prepared in a fight.

  They didn’t have time for an argument right now, though, so Ash had to scramble to offer the young woman a reasonable chance to save face. She could see that Maddie caught on to her trick right away, and shot her a look of approval even as she poured tea into six cups.

  “I could use a hand,” the Drummond matriarch acknowledged as she handed her daughter tea laced liberally with milk and sugar. “Many hands make light work, after all.”

  Maeve glared at her brother but backed down at her mother’s gentle prompting. “Of course, Ma. You’re right. I’ll stay here and help you tidy.”

  “Good.” Maddie nodded as if that settled everything and finished distributing steaming cups. “The rest of you can leave as soon as you’ve finished your tea. You need something warm in your bellies after that shock and to keep away the chill.”

  Everyone in the room sipped obediently. Kylie’s eyes sparkled over the rim of her cup, and when she set it back down in the saucer she sent Maddie a grin full of mischief. “Have you ever thought about visiting Boston, Maddie? I have a feeling my grandmother would just love to meet you.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Once again Drum led the way through mostly empty fields and up to the base of the tower hill. His companions remained silent even as the world around them began to recover from the shock of the quake. Birds and insects had resumed their choruses, and in the distance he could see the locals moving about to resume their lives and assess the damage. No one in the pubs tonight would be speaking about anything else, so everyone had to gather up what material they could to make their stories stand out.

  Another small aftershock hit shortly after they left the house, but it had done little more than vibrate against the soles of their shoes. Still, Drum kept his eyes and ears open as they approached their destination.

  Even so, the smell struck him first. He drew to a stop and looked around, brow furrowed. The air carried the scent of something sharp and rotten, bitter and earthy at the same time. The others looked to him for a moment until Kylie gagged and made a face of disgust.

  “Oy, what is that farkakte stench? That’s just nasty.”

  Ash inhaled and muttered a curse. She looked to Dag with a grim expression. “Brimstone.”

  The other Guardian nodded, though it was tough to differentiate between his grim face and his regular face. The others could only make assumptions based on Kylie’s look of worry. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”

  Drum choked back a laugh. “Brimstone? As in fire and? The literal fires of hell? That sounds pretty fecking bad to me, whatever the experts weigh in.”

  “I thought that all you guys said the Darkness and the Demons had nothing to do with hell or the devil, or any of that Christian religious stuff.”

  “They do not,” Dag reassured his mate.

  “It is slightly complicated from a human perspective,” Ash clarified. “Your kind has always responded best to the tales to which they can most easily relate. The earlier you look back in your own history, the more important it was for a story to contain characters with recognizably human qualities. A figure called Satan or Lucifer or the devil was simpler for early humans to understand than a formless, emotionless, inhuman concept called the Darkness.”

  “Likewise a binary system of heaven and hell as the only other planes of existence, one in the sky and one in the center of the earth, made more sense back then than the idea of a limitless number of other planes existing alongside this one.” Dag paused and shrugged. “Now there is a certain irony in the fact that those who believe in heaven and hell reject the not
ion of extra dimensions while your modern scientists are just beginning to understand them.”

  Drum sorted through the explanations in search of a few words that might actually explain anything. He wound up with a sharp pain above his right eye. “All right, so what you’re saying is that the fires of hell don’t actually come from hell? Then where do they come from?”

  Ash said, “From another plane, one with many of the characteristics humans attribute to that place.”

  “But you’re absolutely certain that it isn’t.”

  She shrugged. “Reasonably.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring.”

  Kylie interrupted with a raised hand and lifted brows. “Um, I don’t mean to sound like a schlemiel here, but no one has really answered the important question. No matter where the stinky stuff may have originated, what I want to know is how it’s ended up polluting the Irish countryside?”

  Exactly. Drum nodded and shifted to stand shoulder to shoulder with the American. Well, shoulder to sternum. Standing next to the tiny woman made him feel like he had just been dragged under to visit the land of the pixies. If pixies flung Yiddish and subsisted entirely on bagels and Coca-Cola.

  Ash and Dag shared a meaningful gaze then turned to survey the area. “We will just have to find out,” the female Guardian said. “Stay behind us. If something lies in wait, we can survive a surprise attack. You Wardens can watch our backs.”

  Kylie wrinkled her eyebrows and dropped her gaze as they fell into formation. “Backs, butts,” she murmured to Drum. “Potato, po-tah-to, is what I say.”

  He sputtered a laugh and followed the Guardians around the side of the hill. The woman was outrageous, but he thought he needed the laugh. Especially if they were going to run into the source of that sulfur smell.

  He had a pretty good idea that Ash and Dag already knew what they were going to find and were keeping it to themselves until they could prove or disprove their theory. Part of him wanted to be offended by their refusal to share, because no one liked to walk into a potentially dangerous situation behind a blindfold. But the rest of him urged him to relax. He trusted his Guardian. He might not have any idea what feelings, if any, she had for him when it came to their untraditional relationship, but he knew in his heart and his gut that she would never willingly place him in harm’s way. If he stumbled into it on his own, he also knew she would be there to get him out.

  At least, she would if she were not trapped in an unbreakable prison of spellbound stone.

  Drum had guessed that their slow circling of the base of the hill had something to do with reconnaissance and ensuring that nothing lurked in wait outside the pile of rubble to which the tower itself had been reduced. He felt certain nothing could possibly wait inside, given that there was no inside left worth mentioning. The stone walls had collapsed inward, converting the remains of the great round room into a quarry slag heap. Based on the depth of the piled rock, he figured that something large had locked the opening to the cavern below and prevented the debris from tumbling into the cavern.

  They rounded the side of the hillock and Drum instantly spotted what the Guardians had been looking for. A ragged, black crevice split open the earth in a narrow slash, like the eye of a giant needle. It looked wide enough for a man to pass through, provided he turned sideways to accommodate his shoulders and didn’t indulge too often in a traditional breakfast fry-up. Drum could only assume that it led inside the same cavern he and Ash had fallen into a few days previous. He couldn’t imagine there was room for a second separate cave in that spot. It really wasn’t a very big hill.

  The scent of brimstone wafted out of the darkness, and Dag glanced over his shoulder at the Wardens. “Stay close,” he said quietly.

  Drum imagined he’d have no trouble with that suggestion. He followed the Guardians through the opening at Kylie’s insistence.

  “I may not be in the same class as Ella or the others when it comes to throwing magic around,” she whispered, “but I’ve been doing this longer than you. I’ve learned a thing or two about defensive spells. Let me cover our backs.”

  He gritted his teeth and agreed, mostly because an argument seemed foolish if they needed to sneak up on something, but partly because she had a point. He hated it, though. He had grown up as the only boy in a family of girls, and as capable as they might be, his father had raised him with a wide streak of protectiveness and somewhat antiquated chivalry. Being taken care of sat uncomfortably on his shoulders; he felt much more at ease leading the charge.

  Although maybe he could learn to make an exception in the case of Demons. That wouldn’t reflect poorly on his masculinity, would it?

  The first step through the narrow crevice plunged the group into darkness and surrounded them with the scent of sulfur. Maybe it was just his imagination running wild, but he could also have sworn that the temperature rose as they passed through into an open cavern. It was too dark to see whether it was the same one as last time, but the odds of anything else seemed astronomical. He waited for someone to activate some sort of light and shifted nervously when no one did.

  “Guardians,” he heard Kylie mutter from just over his right shoulder. “Just because they can see in the dark, they forget that everyone else isn’t a vampire bat.”

  She said something else that he couldn’t catch and a pale glow appeared in the darkness beside him. “Was that a spell?” he asked.

  She stepped forward and grinned at him, jiggling a small flashlight. “Nope. Duracell. I always found that rabbit creepy.”

  Drum shook his head and turned his attention back to the Guardians. They moved forward cautiously. Kylie remained just behind his shoulder and made certain to aim the small beam of her torch to the ground just in front of his feet. He had to shorten his natural stride and shuffle a bit, but the little circle of illumination at least prevented him from falling flat on his face. Meanwhile Ash and Dag moved smoothly through the pitch-black passage, their heads turning from side to side as they scanned the cavern for anything of interest.

  Or, of potential threat. At least, that’s what Drum hoped they kept in mind.

  It took until the two Guardians fanned slightly apart and shifted their forms, regaining their natural appearances, before Drum realized the area they had just passed through was a narrow passage into the cavern rather than the cavern itself. By now, his pupils had dilated as far as they could, and between acclimation and the small bit of light provided by Kylie’s flashlight, he could begin to make out the rough corners where the passage opened into a larger space.

  Well, he could make it out for a second. Then Kylie’s light clicked off, and he almost jumped out of his skin.

  Everyone paused, the silence of the subterranean atmosphere almost eerie in its completeness. There were no birds singing here, no crickets or buzzing bees, no sheep bleating or cows lowing. The only sounds came from them, their soft breathing and the thumping of his own heart echoing in Drum’s ears.

  He tried to block out his heartbeat and to concentrate on the quiet and the blackness. It took a moment of intense focus, but after a few seconds he peered around a winged form and thought he saw a dull red glow in the floor maybe twenty or thirty feet in front of their group.

  “What is that?” he asked as softly as he could. “Do you see that light?”

  He didn’t hear a reply, but he recognized the feel of Ash’s fingertips against his chest. She pressed lightly for a moment, hovered, and then slipped away. Message received. Not graciously, but still received. He stayed in place and waited while she and Dag eased farther into the dark without making a single sound.

  The almost imperceptible red glow never blinked or wavered, so he guessed that the warriors had chosen an indirect path toward the spot from which it emanated. While he understood the strategy behind the decision, he might have preferred otherwise, because it meant he couldn’t keep track of their movements at all. He just had to wait there in the darkness until they either returned or didn’t.

&
nbsp; What would the cutoff time be? he wondered. Did he give them ten minutes? Twenty? A couple of hours?

  Kylie shifted behind him and laid a hand on his forearm. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, leaning close. “They can handle this. Trust me.”

  It wasn’t a matter of trust, he wanted to tell her. His nerves came from someplace more visceral and altogether more primal.

  All humans feared the dark, whether they admitted it or not. It was why they had spent the history of their evolution creating progressively more advanced means of driving it away, first by learning to make fire, then to harness it, then to magnify it, then to replace it by newer forms of illumination that were safer, certainly, but ultimately more powerful, more stable, and longer lasting. Man had made his artificial lights so bright and so widespread that he had almost forgotten what true darkness looked like, felt like. Even in the deepest night, all a person had to do was flip a switch, or press a button, or turn a knob, and light flooded out like a divine blessing. In a large portion of the world, the lights man had made had succeeded in drowning out the stars.

  It took a place like this and darkness this deep to remind humans that the blackness had not been vanquished. It had merely retreated, and it waited at the edges of civilization for its opportunity to creep forward again.

  It also didn’t help that they were underground. Instinct urged humanity toward open areas and defensible positions. Man wanted to see danger coming and wanted barriers between him and any outside threat to be neat and level and easily controlled. He was meant to stay on the surface of the earth, the planet’s crust a barrier in the manner of human skin, not to be burrowed under except in cases of extreme need. Ants and moles could live beneath the earth, but man needed open air and wide skies as security so that he knew he would not be crushed to death in his sleep by a collapsing mantle of rock and soil.

  He therefore wanted to explain to Kylie that it wasn’t he, Michael Drummond, who was worried, it was the essence of humanity itself. Humanity just lacked the ability to break into a cold sweat the way he could. Of course, it didn’t help his anxiety to know that the woman he thought he was falling in love with was out there where he couldn’t see her, putting herself in danger, while he stood here contemplating the technological history of his species. Dammit, he ought to be helping.